[jonathankoren]

Of course a tax code is complicated. It touches pretty everything with respect to income and expenditures, with numerous special cases. The truth is, that most people only deal with the same two forms, a 1040 and a W2. Like anything complex, only a very small portion is actually utilized by any particular individual. Glossing over this, and instead trumpeting some canard like number of pages, or number or words, is simply a rhetorical device to mask different objective.

[throw10920]

Of course there are "special cases" - that should be obvious. However, it's very much not obvious that there are 74,000 pages worth of special cases, which is the actual argument that I'm making that you conveniently ignored. It's pretty clear that the extreme case of tailoring the tax code to the individual results in a hundred thousand clauses of the tax code, which is infeasible, and so there's necessarily the lossy aggregation of many real-world individual financial situations into a smaller number of "paths" through the tax code.

> Glossing over this, and instead trumpeting some canard like number of pages, or number or words, is simply a rhetorical device to mask different objective.

There's no "glossing over" - it's pretty clear that even though there are "a lot" of special cases, that there are reasonable (and unreasonable) amounts of complexity of the tax code relative to the distribution of circumstances. It sure sounds like you have another objective that you're masking yourself.

[jonathankoren]

It is glossing over, because the vast majority is irrelevant to most people.

Do I care about the ins and outs of alimony and child support? Nope! I am not divorced.

Do I care about the ins and outs of how to deprecate the cost of my car as a business expense? Nope! I’m not self-employed.

How about foreign investment income? Nope!

How about income from farms? Oil wells on government land? Military income while serving overseas? Nope! Nope! Nope!

Do I care about the Earned Income Tax Credit? Yup! Do I understand it? Nope! Has the IRS sent me a letter after I filed saying that I qualified for the EIC, and they amended my 1040 to claim it? Yup!

The point is, if the special cases aren’t applicable, it’s the same as if they don’t exist.

Why do you care about inapplicable parts of the tax code?

Let’s be honest here. Most people have a W2, and that’s pretty much it. If they have a mortgage, their lender has already submitted a 1090 on their behalf. That’s it. You spend your day literally just copying numbers from forms and then subtracting. There’s no point to a person doing this.